Blogging Pedagogy - Banned Books

Graphing Empathy

Scott Garbacz — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 11:20:32 +0000

Author:

Scott Garbacz

Image Credit:

Survey created in Canvas.

This semester, I taught a Banned Books class focusing on the ways that authors deploy empathy. One cornerstone of the class was a series of daily surveys. Each discussion was preceded by a survey (pictured above) in which students gave an informal ranking of their empathetic response to the main character(s) featured in the day’s readings. My goal was to help students theorize their own responses to stories, but I also ended up generating some unexpected revelations.

The surveys about The Satanic Verses went as I expected, but not as my students expected, which provided a valuable learning opportunity. Initially, the novel’s two Indian protagonists were too alien for students to initially identify with them. As a result, student empathy with both characters increased as they found themselves capable of projecting their own identities into Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta. Halfway through the book, however, they were surprised to find their ability to empathize with the characters to be dramatically undercut. My general conclusion is that this dropoff was caused when the details of Rushdie’s novel began to violate students’ expectations of the character. The students own responses, however subjective or imprecise, allowed me to introduce the concept of “false empathy,” where a deep sense of empathic connection actually serves to blind students to the realities of these characters. The temporary drop in students’ empathy, then, might actually reflect better reading practices, as they deconstruct false images of the character and began to grapple with the unfamiliarity of the characters. This in turn lead to better, perhaps less false, empathy. Most students ended up reporting their strongest connections with the characters as they concluded the novel.

The graph for Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, unfortunately, was less enlightening—probably because I chose the wrong character. I had my students rate their connection not with the traumatized Pecola, but with the book’s primary narrator, Claudia. Since her character was not particularly dynamic, students quickly built up empathy for her and stayed quite empathetic. In fact, the only point of interest was a related poll I did on students reactions to the aged child molester who appears later in the book; those results, however, are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Huckleberry Finn generated the most interesting results, managing to truly surprise me. This was true not in the overall graph, but in the details. Generally, Huck followed a similar sine-curve pattern to Gibreel and Saladin, while the less complex (and more passive) escaped slave Jim consistently gained empathy in a linear pattern close to that of Claudia. Yet on the day that students read about Huck’s climactic decision to free Jim even if it meant embracing a life of wickedness, something interesting happened.

Above, you can see a more detailed breakdown of student’s responses before and after they read Chapter 31. Before, most students felt a sense of “moderate emotional connection” with Huck. That is, they felt emotionally tied to Huck Finn’s fate, but they didn’t identify with him on a deep level. After Chapter 31, the class polarized. A narrow majority, as I suspected, responded to Huck’s troubled theological and ethical musings by doubling down on their emotional investment in the character, reporting a newfound “strong emotional character.” But a very significant portion of the classroom found the chapter distancing. They reported being able to “see where he [Huck Finn] was coming from” intellectually, but they lost (at least temporarily) their ability to empathize with Huck.

Charting empathy using an online survey at the beginning of class turned out to be not only a great teaching opportunity, but a great learning opportunity. It certainly didn’t provide rigorous data, and I would be hesitant to make any firm claims based on such an informal series of surveys, but it did provide something valuable: a new way of thinking about how students read, and a series of talking points allowing students to reconsider the nature of their empathic connections with fictional characters.

Reading Like a Detective

Hala Herbly — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 04:17:33 +0000

Author:

Hala Herbly

Image Credit:

British Broadcasting Corporation

Close reading is a cornerstone of literature classes, but it can be a drag to teach. The excitement I sometimes feel about finding new and contradictory meanings for words a little difficult to translate to the average non-major (and even the average major). So this semester I decided to frame my close reading lesson in terms of detective work. Specifically, I decided to show them about fifteen minutes' worth an episode of the BBC drama Sherlock.

umbrella_slideshow_01.jpg

Here's my reasoning. Sherlock is a rather eccentric "private consultant" with an uncanny ability to interpret crime scenes. He is able to do this through his well-honed powers of observation, which allow him to infer a shocking amount of information about people, places, and things. For example, upon his first meeting with his partner Dr. Watson, Sherlock is immediately able to tell that Watson is an Iraq war veteran who suffers from PTSD and has an estranged sibling. This close attention to detail makes Sherlock interesting to us, but intolerable to those around him (and this of course is the pleasure of watching the show).

Like detective work, close reading requires a sharp attention to detail. The opening lines and stage directions of a play like Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, for example, tell us almost everything we need to know about the main character. But it is a skill to be able to infer this much from just a few details. For one thing, it takes a lot of patience with the text. It also, as I mentioned above, requires the ability to focus in on details that might appear to be insignificant. And finally, it involves a kind of confidence--confidence in the text to be able to produce meaning that goes "deeper" than initally apparent, and confidence in one's own reading ability and "sense" of the text. Though I would have hated to hear this myself in my late teens and early twenties, I always tell my class to follow their intuition or "hunches" about the text. Without the willingness to take this kind of interpretive risk, you end up with the dreaded "um, I think we might be reading too much into this." I try to discourage that kind of thinking by telling my class that any kind of interpretation, no matter how wild, is valid as long as they can back it up convincingly with evidence.

I guess, then, that I try to teach my class to assume a particular kind of attitude toward the text. While I am always careful to lay out the historical context of any work that we're reading, I also think it's important to encourage them to "read into" the text. This demonstrates to them that meaning is something that they can learn how to create, rather than something they've simply inherited from the critics and readers before them.

Poetry in Images

Mike Widner — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:30:12 +0000

Author:

Mike Widner

Image Credit:

Steve A. Johnson

Students often have difficulty reading and interpreting poetry. It's an alien skill, it seems, for most of them. The challenge is even greater when there's a significant language barrier, such as trying to read Chaucer in Middle English. In my Banned Books course this semester, therefore, I had students collaboratively annotate passages from The Canterbury Tales with relevant images. This exercise would work, however, for any poem.

We began with a wiki page that had the introductory passage from the "General Prologue" in place. Students then searched for images that would annotate an individual line or phrase. For example, the famous first line ("Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote") received an image of flowers in the rain to illustrate April showers. The image at the top of this page remarks upon the Miller's portrait, in which Chaucer regularly compares him to a hog.

Once students annotated most of the lines, a visual narrative arose that gave the students an easier entry into the meaning of the lines. The prevalence of nature imagery and ideas of generation and rebirth in the first 18 lines of the General Prologue came through clearly. By making these themes visible, we were then able to return to a discussion of the text while also increasing student confidence in their ability to navigate the difficulties of the poem. We also were able to discuss how the images did not always match the precise meaning of the words, thereby re-emphasizing the textual specifics.

Because this exercise was done with a class-restricted wiki, we did not need to worry about making sure the images used were licensed appropriately. Only students in the course could see it. For a different method of interpreting poetry via images, see Elizabeth Frye's lesson plan "Teaching Poetry with Image Databases."

Why ARIS Works for Literature Classes

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:23:57 +0000

Author:

Cleve Wiese

Image Credit:

Cleve Wiese

So my Banned Books E314 class is wrapping up the ARIS project described in my recent lesson plan post, and as I reflect on the experience I find myself fending off the complaints of a reasonable (if imaginary) skeptic: Sure, games are rhetorical, so it makes sense to analyze them in a rhetoric class. And sure, procedural rhetoric is an important mode of argumentation, so game design makes sense – in a rhetoric class. And yes, given the proliferation of location based media, the creation of location based, augmented reality games is probably a valuable experience for students – again, in a rhetoric class. But why, this skeptic asks, would any of this be relevant to a literature class – a banned books class, no less – in which your texts are predetermined novels and poems? Aren’t you just driving a square peg into a round hole for the sake of a personal (read, selfish) interest?

I have a few responses for this critic. To begin with, I see the E314 course as a general introduction to a variety of ways of reading and analyzing literature. For me, that means spending part of the semester focusing on writers and their historical contexts, part of the semester focused on new-crit-inspired modes of close-reading and formal analysis, and part of the semester focused on reader response (things don’t break down quite that cleanly, of course, but that’s the guiding, tripartite framework). This assignment emphasizes the third approach: Beginning with the Aristotelian idea that people can only experience things (fiction included) through the lenses of concrete real-world experiences, memories, and images anyway, the purpose here is not to analyze what a text means, in itself or in some particular historical context, but what can be done with it, right now, at UT Austin in April 2011. The novel or poem is merely the raw material for a new creation that is literally embedded by students on the real-world space of the UT Campus via the ARIS platform.

But, my critic counters, if you so completely de-emphasize the text itself, how can this assignment possibly teach literary analysis? And what about your responsibility to focus on the bannedness of these banned books?

This assignment teaches analysis because every ARIS game the students design has to make an argument. And although that argument isn’t limited by the text, it is an interpretation of the text, inspired by the text, in response to the text. From this point of view, it’s really not all that far from the kind of literary analysis we already ask students to do all the time. The difference here is that the games students create self-consciously filter source material through their own real world concerns and lived experiences. For example, one game based on Catcher in the Rye includes an exchange with NPCs inspired by peripheral characters from Holden’s West Village drinking binge – but in the game, these characters are virtually embedded on the South Mall, and the focus of their exchange with the PC (in the role of Holden) is refocused on a particular concern of a particular group of UT readers/English students/game designers: underage drinking. These connections – between personal experiences and Holden’s fictional night out – occurred to these students in their roles as readers. And in their roles as students in my course earlier in the semester, they were expected to filter this seemingly irrelevant association out of writing assignments. But in this assignment, in the new roles of game designers, they are encouraged to put that subjective “noise” at the center of a new product focused not on the text alone, but on the intersection of the text and their everyday lives.

This may seem a counter-intuitive, or even self-indulgent, approach to teaching literature. But I find it strikingly appropriate for a Banned Books class: Most of the controversies we discuss have less to do with what disputed literary works mean in any objective sense than with what they are used for by different stakeholders in different cultural contexts. In some cases (such as The Satanic Verses, which we’re studying right now), the books themselves seem deliberately designed for this kind of fragmentation and re-mediation by a wide range of people in many places with a wide range of political, religious, or cultural agendas. In fact, this is the way books often work and have a measurable effect in the world. So I think it makes much more sense to give students the chance to engage in the same kind of openly rhetorical, subjective, irreverent appropriation of literature than to flatly condemn it as ignorant or wrong.

Finally, I think that playing with ARIS is an amazingly interesting way to get students thinking about persona and audience. In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning, James Gee discusses three levels of identity operative in a role playing video games: Real-world identity (student, teacher, etc.), virtual identity, and the intersection of real and virtual identities in a “projective identity” (what the real world ‘me’ aspires to for the virtual ‘me’). Similarly, in this assignment students first have to think of themselves in the real-world identity of game designers with the confidence and authority to play with (that is, freely appropriate) previously sacrosanct literary texts. Second, they have to design a persona for players to adopt and they have to figure out to effectively convey this role through dialogue and gameplay (as you can see below, in dialogue situations the ARIS player is visually represented by only a silhouette and the word “YOU,” a limitation that forces designers to find other compelling ways to convey 1^st person characterization). Finally, the students have to think about projective identity not so much in the aspirational sense that Gee talks about as in a closely related rhetorical sense: ‘What,’ they have to ask, ‘will players be encouraged to believe in their real world identities as a result of experiencing this game through the particular virtual identity I design.’ In other words, the projective identity becomes the interpretive thesis or argument.

Ok, my critic says, even if I buy all of what you’ve argued for here, I still think you’re trying to turn a literature assignment into a rhetoric assignment. To this I plead guilty, at least in part. But since every paper I ask my students to write requires them to make an argument for a particular audience, I’m not sure this is such a bad – or unusual – thing.